Birthday of Gladiator
May 1, 2000 in Los Angeles, the premiere of Ridley Scott's film "Gladiator." The premiere of the film in Russia, unlike many other great American film productions, took place 17 days after the American one. Promptly.
The definition of the genre of the film "Gladiator" is very remarkable. IMDB defines the genre of this film as "action, adventure, drama." And Kinopoisk - as "action, HISTORY, adventure, drama." Perhaps Kinopoisk, usually striving to copy IMDB, in this case “showed liberty” thanks to the respected Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev, who had been cooperating with Kinopoisk for many years. In his review, Sergei Kudryavtsev defines the genre of the film absolutely unequivocally: "historical film."
Meanwhile, the historical in this film has only two names: Commodus and Marcus Aurelius. Indeed, there were emperors with such names in the history of Ancient Rome. But the history in this film is ended on the using of these names. Everything outside of these names has the same relevance to history as the command "Fire!" to archery, and German Shepherd dogs to the 2nd century AD. Therefore, it would be most correct to define the genre of this film as a “costumed action movie”. Otherwise, we fear, somebody will start to study the history of Ancient Rome being based on this film. Like somewhere, they say, the history of the Middle Ages is studied on the "Game of Thrones."
However, we will not strongly blame the creators of the film for the free treatment of history. After all, the British and Americans are forgiven for having little knowledge of the details of, in fact, Italian history. This is especially excusable against the background of those "liberties" that some domestic directors allowed themselves (and still do) in relation to domestic history. But the conversation about this is still ahead of us.
By the way, many film critics, and even the authors of the film themselves, often define the "Gladiator" genre as the film of the "sword and sandals". Well, and we, as mentioned above, will perceive this film as a costumed action movie.
The film received 59 film awards and 104 nominations. But what’s noteworthy: among these awards, the vast majority of awards are from the United States and Great Britain. Which is not surprising, given that the creation of the film was mainly attended by American and British companies, and the director of the film, a British by birth, works in the United States.
Among the festival achievements mentioned above are 12 Oscar nominations, of which 5 were won, 5 Golden Globe nominations, of which 2 were won, 15 British BAFTA nominations, of which 5 were won. Well, we know well about the passion for self-awarded . At one time, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev explained to us about this passion popularly.
But at the prestigious film forums in Europe and Asia, where there is more respect for history than in the USA, Ridley Scott's film did not achieve any awards. The film was nominated for the European Film Academy Award in the Screen International Award category, i.e. Best non-European film, but European film academics considered that the film by the Chinese director Kar-wai Wong "Fa yeung nin wa 花樣年華 (In the Mood for Love)" is more worthy of this award. Also, the "Gladiator" tried to get the Japanese Academy Award in the Best Foreign Film category, but members of the Japanese Academy considered the film "Dancing in the Dark" by Lars von Trier more worthy of this award.
As for the ratings of the film by American film critics, they can be divided into two parts. One part is raptures, but mainly battle scenes, special effects, colors, costumes, etc. The other part is the condescending bullying of the "porky pie" in the film. However, regarding the video sequence of the picture, Roger Ebert, who rated the film with only two stars out of a possible 4, wrote in his review:
"The film looks muddy, fuzzy and indistinct. Its colors are mud tones at the drab end of the palette, and it seems to have been filmed on grim and overcast days. This darkness and a lack of detail in the long shots helps obscure shabby special effects (the Colosseum in Rome looks like a model from a computer game), and the characters bring no cheer: They're bitter, vengeful, depressed. By the end of this long film, I would have traded any given gladiatorial victory for just one shot of blue skies."
But the audience took the film "with a bang". This is evidenced by the financial success of the picture. With a total cost of production and promotion of $ 145.7 million, its worldwide box office was more than $ 460 million.
82% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world rated this film from 8 to 10. And 30% of viewers generally rated the film with the highest score - 10. However, nothing surprising. As Russian film critic Alexei Vasiliev said,
"for schoolchildren who are full of popcorn, this fake is a bingo, indeed".
Taking into account the above indicators of Gladiator’s success, his rating according to FilmGourmand is 8.936, which makes him the 182nd Rank in the Golden Thousand.